Resistive heating devices have applications in magnetic recording data storage systems, such as hard disk drives. One such application is TAMR. In conventional magnetic recording hard disk drives, digital information is stored in the magnetic media by using a miniaturized thin film inductive write head. The write head is patterned on the trailing surface of a slider that also has an air-bearing surface (ABS) to allow the slider to ride on a thin film of air above the surface of the rotating disk. The write head is an inductive head with a thin film electrical coil located between the poles of a magnetic yoke. When write current is applied to the coil, the pole tips provide a localized magnetic field across a gap that magnetizes the recording layer on the disk into one of two distinct magnetic states (binary data bits). The magnetic material for use as the recording layer on the disk is chosen to have sufficient coercivity such that the magnetized data bits are written precisely and retain their magnetization state until written over by new data bits. Increasing the coercivity of the recording layer material is known to increase the thermal stability of the written bits, but requires a stronger write field. A proposed solution to this problem is TAMR, wherein the magnetic material in the media is heated locally to near its Curie temperature during writing so that the coercivity is low enough for writing to occur, but high enough for thermal stability of the recorded bits at ambient temperature.
Resistive heating devices have also been proposed for use in magnetic recording hard disk drives, but in a different application than TAMR. In this application the resistive heater is located near poles of the inductive write head. The heater expands the write poles and causes the pole tips to “protrude” from the ABS and thus move closer to the disk.
Data storage systems based on atomic force microscopy (AFM) have also been proposed for both thermally-assisted recording on magnetic media and for thermo-mechanical recording on polymer-based media. In both of these AFM-based data storage systems a resistive “nanoheater” is located at the tip of a cantilever to heat the media.
Materials proposed for use as resistive heaters in the above described applications include graphite-like carbon, aluminum (Al), chromium (Cr), nichrome (NiCr), tantalum (Ta) and titanium (Ti).
What is needed is a new material for resistive heating devices.